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AT THE MOVIES

By Dave Kehr

Published: August 1, 2003

The Flogger Also Suffers

Speaking by telephone from her home in London, the British actress Geraldine McEwan sounds like the embodiment of grandmotherly sweetness. Her beautifully modulated voice, after 50 years of stage and film work, purrs with warmth and concern.

But in ''The Magdalene Sisters,'' Peter Mullan's harsh, angry film about the oppressive homes for ''wayward girls'' operated by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, Ms. McEwan plays the juiciest villainess since Cruella De Vil: she is Sister Bridget, the cold-hearted, blatantly sadistic head of one of the Magdalene Asylums, as the workhouselike shelters were called, where the film, which opens today in Manhattan, Los Angeles and San Francisco, takes place. (Review, Page 10.)

''I really felt quite sorry for her,'' Ms. McEwan said of her character, who seems to relish beating her young charges with a leather strap. ''I felt she was just quite a misguided person. That someone like her should be given that kind of power is incredibly dangerous because in point of fact she is highly intelligent but basically frustrated and lonely. In the circumstances in which she finds herself, in that asylum with all women, and the religious fervor and belief of it all, she behaves in such an excessive manner that her own frustrations and desires come out in mental and physical abuse.''

Part of her preparation for the role, Ms. McEwan said, consisted of imagining a past for her character. ''Sister Bridget has obviously been in convents all her life and probably was a very young novice,'' she said. ''She's become totally blinkered, and her own compassion and humanity has dried up and withered. I thought that she was much more intelligent than the other nuns, that she was intellectually frustrated.

''I understand that a lot of the nuns in those asylums were very often girls who had been in orphanages and who had been deprived in their childhood. They hadn't received much in the way of education, and they were as a whole bovine, for want of a better word. I felt that Sister Bridget must have found that very uninspiring, though of course she was incredibly arrogant and autocratic.

''And the way she gets a vicarious pleasure out of the sexuality of the young girls -- some of her dialogue contains some very lewd references to sex, and one feels that she gets a bit of a kick out of that. It's a rather bleak and tortured life really.''

In playing Sister Bridget, Ms. McEwan found, she had to remain standoffish from the rest of the cast and crew, including, to some degree, her director.

''The inner life I do on my own because I think that as an actor you always have to have your own secrets,'' she observed, ''As one learns, inner life is sacred to one's self as a human being, and I think actors are quite protective of the inner lives of the characters that they're playing. I am, anyway. I think it makes it more interesting for an audience because there's something to seek out, instead of it being exterior, just displayed.''

Ms. McEwan's dedication to Sister Bridget makes her character frighteningly credible, a genuine human monster. But at the same time it made the shoot desolate. ''I didn't socialize a great deal,'' she said. ''I kept very much to my own dressing room when we were between being on set. Because it just felt that I couldn't be warm and receptive and jokey with everybody when I was about to go in and get out a stick or a strap and give them a good beating.

''So,'' Ms. McEwan concluded, ''It was a bit of a slightly lonely but marvelous experience.''

Turning the Tables

''You'll think of your dentist differently if you see this film,'' said the director Alan Rudolph, whose ''Secret Lives of Dentists,'' adapted by Craig Lucas from Jane Smiley's novella ''The Age of Grief,'' opens in New York City, Los Angeles, and Rhinebeck, N.Y., today. (Review, Page 10.) ''You will see inside of these people because that's what Campbell allows you to do as a performer.''

Campbell is Campbell Scott, who created an ineffably sad, elegant Robert Benchley in Mr. Rudolph's 1994 film ''Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.'' Now he returns to Mr. Rudolph's direction as an upright, rather dull suburban dentist whose facade of cold professionalism dissolves when he begins to suspect that his wife and office partner (Hope Davis) may be having an affair. ''This is what real acting is about,'' Mr. Rudolph said. ''You are with total strangers in a total fictional situation in which you must seek the private, reserved place.''

Few filmmakers love actors the way Mr. Rudolph does. Not only does he cast magical combinations, like Nick Nolte and Julie Christie as husband and wife in the 1997 ''Afterglow,'' but he is also famous (and perhaps, among producers, notorious) for allowing his performers all the room they want for developing their characters while he observes them with his floating, drifting camera.

Actors, in return, love him. It was Mr. Scott who approached Mr. Rudolph about ''Secret Lives,'' he said. ''Campbell called me and said, 'There's this screenplay I've been involved with for a while by Craig Lucas, and I might be able to get this going.' I said: 'Good. If you want to do it, I'll do it. You don't need to send me the script.' ''

When he finally did read it, Mr. Rudolph recalled during a recent visit to New York, he discovered a tightly structured, tightly written screenplay of a sort he has usually avoided in favor of his own more conceptual, nonlinear projects. He remembered telling Mr. Scott: ''This is all new to me, to be given a screenplay to direct that I like. I have no frame of reference as to how to go about this.''

''I love to embellish all the way through,'' Mr. Rudolph said. ''That's why I like to write my own scripts, so I don't have to argue with anybody when I change it all. I like to take my key from the actors.''

But instead of feeling compromised as an auteur, Mr. Rudolph recalled, he experienced something new. ''I can't quite articulate it,'' he said, ''but it was a very liberating experience for me. I stuck with the whole script. It's 90 percent as it was written, if not more.''

But soon Mr. Rudolph was back on the subject of his performers. ''They've known each other for years and years,'' Mr. Rudolph said of Mr. Scott and Ms. Davis, ''and they're both the same kind of actors in that they can make anything, written or otherwise, seem spontaneous and genuine. I think if you start to question the acting in this film, you have to go back to the rule book and reread it. Because this is invisible acting, which I would think is the supreme acting in films.''